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This timeline of chemistry lists important works, discoveries, ideas, inventions, and experiments that significantly changed humanity's understanding of the modern science known as chemistry, defined as the scientific study of the composition of matter and of its interactions.
Known as "the central science", the study of chemistry is strongly influenced by, and exerts a strong influence on, many other scientific and technological fields. Many historical developments that are considered to have had a significant impact upon our modern understanding of chemistry are also considered to have been key discoveries in such fields as physics, biology, astronomy, geology, and materials science. [1]
Prior to the acceptance of the scientific method and its application to the field of chemistry, it is somewhat controversial to consider many of the people listed below as "chemists" in the modern sense of the word. However, the ideas of certain great thinkers, either for their prescience, or for their wide and long-term acceptance, bear listing here.
Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished from each other by the number of protons that are in their atoms. For example, any atom that contains 11 protons is sodium, and any atom that contains 29 protons is copper. Atoms with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons are called isotopes of the same element.
Atomic theory is the scientific theory that matter is composed of particles called atoms. The definition of the word "atom" has changed over the years in response to scientific discoveries. Initially, it referred to a hypothetical concept of there being some fundamental particle of matter, too small to be seen by the naked eye, that could not be divided. Then the definition was refined to being the basic particles of the chemical elements, when chemists observed that elements seemed to combine with each other in ratios of small whole numbers. Then physicists discovered that these particles had an internal structure of their own and therefore perhaps did not deserve to be called "atoms", but renaming atoms would have been impractical by that point.
Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions: their composition, structure, properties, behavior and the changes they undergo during reactions with other substances. Chemistry also addresses the nature of chemical bonds in chemical compounds.
The following outline acts as an overview of and topical guide to chemistry:
Gilbert Newton Lewis was an American physical chemist and a dean of the college of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. Lewis was best known for his discovery of the covalent bond and his concept of electron pairs; his Lewis dot structures and other contributions to valence bond theory have shaped modern theories of chemical bonding. Lewis successfully contributed to chemical thermodynamics, photochemistry, and isotope separation, and is also known for his concept of acids and bases. Lewis also researched on relativity and quantum physics, and in 1926 he coined the term "photon" for the smallest unit of radiant energy.
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.
The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, is an ordered arrangement of the chemical elements into rows ("periods") and columns ("groups"). It is an icon of chemistry and is widely used in physics and other sciences. It is a depiction of the periodic law, which states that when the elements are arranged in order of their atomic numbers an approximate recurrence of their properties is evident. The table is divided into four roughly rectangular areas called blocks. Elements in the same group tend to show similar chemical characteristics.
Oganesson is a synthetic chemical element; it has symbol Og and atomic number 118. It was first synthesized in 2002 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, near Moscow, Russia, by a joint team of Russian and American scientists. In December 2015, it was recognized as one of four new elements by the Joint Working Party of the international scientific bodies IUPAC and IUPAP. It was formally named on 28 November 2016. The name honors the nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian, who played a leading role in the discovery of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. It is one of only two elements named after a person who was alive at the time of naming, the other being seaborgium, and the only element whose eponym is alive as of 2024.
Chemical symbols are the abbreviations used in chemistry, mainly for chemical elements; but also for functional groups, chemical compounds, and other entities. Element symbols for chemical elements, also known as atomic symbols, normally consist of one or two letters from the Latin alphabet and are written with the first letter capitalised.
Sir Joseph John Thomson was an English physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
A period 1 element is one of the chemical elements in the first row of the periodic table of the chemical elements. The periodic table is laid out in rows to illustrate periodic (recurring) trends in the chemical behaviour of the elements as their atomic number increases: a new row is begun when chemical behaviour begins to repeat, meaning that analog elements fall into the same vertical columns. The first period contains fewer elements than any other row in the table, with only two: hydrogen and helium. This situation can be explained by modern theories of atomic structure. In a quantum mechanical description of atomic structure, this period corresponds to the filling of the 1s orbital. Period 1 elements obey the duet rule in that they need two electrons to complete their valence shell.
The periodic table is an arrangement of the chemical elements, structured by their atomic number, electron configuration and recurring chemical properties. In the basic form, elements are presented in order of increasing atomic number, in the reading sequence. Then, rows and columns are created by starting new rows and inserting blank cells, so that rows (periods) and columns (groups) show elements with recurring properties. For example, all elements in group (column) 18 are noble gases that are largely—though not completely—unreactive.
The history of chemistry represents a time span from ancient history to the present. By 1000 BC, civilizations used technologies that would eventually form the basis of the various branches of chemistry. Examples include the discovery of fire, extracting metals from ores, making pottery and glazes, fermenting beer and wine, extracting chemicals from plants for medicine and perfume, rendering fat into soap, making glass, and making alloys like bronze.
In atomic physics and quantum chemistry, the Aufbau principle, also called the Aufbau rule, states that in the ground state of an atom or ion, electrons first fill subshells of the lowest available energy, then fill subshells of higher energy. For example, the 1s subshell is filled before the 2s subshell is occupied. In this way, the electrons of an atom or ion form the most stable electron configuration possible. An example is the configuration 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p3 for the phosphorus atom, meaning that the 1s subshell has 2 electrons, the 2s subshell has 2 electrons, the 2p subshell has 6 electrons, and so on.
In chemistry, the history of molecular theory traces the origins of the concept or idea of the existence of strong chemical bonds between two or more atoms.
In chemistry, periodic trends are specific patterns present in the periodic table that illustrate different aspects of certain elements when grouped by period and/or group. They were discovered by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1863. Major periodic trends include atomic radius, ionization energy, electron affinity, electronegativity, nucleophilicity, electrophilicity, valency, nuclear charge, and metallic character. Mendeleev built the foundation of the periodic table. Mendeleev organized the elements based on atomic weight, leaving empty spaces where he believed undiscovered elements would take their places. Mendeleev’s discovery of this trend allowed him to predict the existence and properties of three unknown elements, which were later discovered by other chemists and named gallium, scandium, and germanium. English physicist Henry Moseley discovered that organizing the elements by atomic number instead of atomic weight would naturally group elements with similar properties.
Krypton is a chemical element; it has symbol Kr and atomic number 36. It is a colorless, odorless noble gas that occurs in trace amounts in the atmosphere and is often used with other rare gases in fluorescent lamps. Krypton is chemically inert.
In chemistry, the whole number rule states that the masses of the isotopes are whole number multiples of the mass of the hydrogen atom. The rule is a modified version of Prout's hypothesis proposed in 1815, to the effect that atomic weights are multiples of the weight of the hydrogen atom. It is also known as the Aston whole number rule after Francis W. Aston who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1922 "for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule."
The Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (CIAAW) is an international scientific committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) under its Division of Inorganic Chemistry. Since 1899, it is entrusted with periodic critical evaluation of atomic weights of chemical elements and other cognate data, such as the isotopic composition of elements. The biennial CIAAW Standard Atomic Weights are accepted as the authoritative source in science and appear worldwide on the periodic table wall charts.
The discovery of the neutron and its properties was central to the extraordinary developments in atomic physics in the first half of the 20th century. Early in the century, Ernest Rutherford developed a crude model of the atom, based on the gold foil experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. In this model, atoms had their mass and positive electric charge concentrated in a very small nucleus. By 1920, isotopes of chemical elements had been discovered, the atomic masses had been determined to be (approximately) integer multiples of the mass of the hydrogen atom, and the atomic number had been identified as the charge on the nucleus. Throughout the 1920s, the nucleus was viewed as composed of combinations of protons and electrons, the two elementary particles known at the time, but that model presented several experimental and theoretical contradictions.
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